Now My Watch Begins
by randolhllee
Summary: After Shaw's trail runs cold, Root is left to deal with her absence in whatever way she can. What will happen when she finds the medal Gen gave to Shaw?
1. Chapter 1

There wasn't much to go through; it wasn't as if Shaw had ever had a lot of possessions. Root had always felt a prickling on the back of her neck, an electricity, when Shaw was in the room, and it made her presence seem permanent and solid. With that pure power gone, the spaces that had once housed Shaw were once again empty and cold.

Still, there was a ritual to the whole affair, which took place spontaneously one Sunday when the static silence was particularly stifling. It started when Root took up Shaw's things like sacraments, placing them reverently into prayerfully sealed cardboard boxes against her return. When she had finished two boxes off, with the last touches of her fingers an implicit blessing and prayer all in one, John got up without a word to join her. He carried the boxes in a long procession toward a corner of the subway, where Bear began his long vigil over the carefully stacked, tiny altar they made of Shaw's few possessions. Harold watched over the whole process from his desk, a minor god silenced by his inability to stop the thunder roll of anything that had happened.

The motions helped, but once the quiet service ended, Root was left without even the proof that Shaw had once existed. She started to walk at night, long, erratic journeys governed by the shadow map. If the Machine noticed that Root frequented the places she had once been to with Shaw, She remained silent about it.

She even went back to Sameen Grey's apartment. She crouched and scuttled her way along a dank alley, her long legs finding purchase on the broken fire escape as she made her silent pilgrimage. The heavy window opened with a yawning creak of the casement, barely leaving her enough room to slip inside.

The interior was unremarkable, although Root was careful to notice the distinction between Shaw's natural inclination towards minimalism and the necessity of making the apartment seem as normal as possible for her cover. Either way, Samaritan's agents had taken the residence apart in their search for any clue of Shaw's whereabouts. No one had since entered.

A light layer of dust covered everything, dulling the small gleams of streetlights that managed to make their way through the covered windows. In her mind, Root held this apartment up against her mental picture of Shaw's previous loft. It was a picture taken in haste, in the dark, just before she tasered Shaw; she had not had the time to risk examining it more closely, lest Shaw wake to find her before she was ready to subdue the agent. In some ways, Root had always been ready for Shaw; in others, she had been caught unaware, a feeling that caught up with her and settled in her chest at night to reproach her.

She ripped the blankets off the bed and shook them out to get rid of the dust before curling up in the center of Shaw's bed. She flipped the pillow over to reveal the cleaner side, but paused when she felt cold metal underneath. She pulled the pillow off completely to examine what Shaw kept so close to her while she slept.

Root smiled softly to herself when she saw the combat knife, more a habit than a real expression of any happiness. Even with the guns almost certainly secured to the frame of the bed, Shaw had always given herself options.

When she turned her attention to the other object on the bed, her smile flickered and died. She picked it up and ran fingers over the smooth surface of a medal, one she had never seen before. She couldn't read Russian, but slipped it into her pocket nevertheless. Its slight weight still pressed on her stomach the rest of the night, a new question to set her mind on, if only to keep it off all the dead ends she had reached in her quest to find Sameen.

When the first dim warnings of dawn started to creep through the cracks between buildings, Root unfolded herself gingerly from Shaw's bed to leave. She paused outside the dark window of the apartment, casting shadows on shadows, forestalling for a moment the finality of her exit. With the picture of the apartment burned into her memory and the medal burning a promise in her pocket, Root slithered down the fire escape and began her journey through blind spots back to the subway.

* * *

><p>This is the first chapter of what will probably be a three-part fic. It will also likely become part of my (much longer) work "The Long Game," but as it would be something like Ch. 25 and I'm on Ch. 3, I thought I'd post it separately as well and get some thoughts. Please review and let me know what you thought!<p>

Tumblr user pentheg-careny was nice enough to let me link to her work, so if you want a visual for this chapter, it can be found at post/109083076833/sameen-i-know-youll-be-pissed-off-once-you . And check out her other stuff as well, it's awesome!


	2. Chapter 2

Root's fingers tapped out a light drum tattoo of hope on her laptop keyboard. Her gaze fixed on the black and white numbers and letters streaming from nothingness onto the screen, reflecting off her eyes in an endless loop that connected her mind to the machine that had always seemed like a natural extension of her body. The keys soothed the calluses she had built up in endless weeks of chasing whispers of Shaw with a gun in each hand. Now, time and space disappeared; there was only a long string of code that went on forever.

She heard Bear whine and turned her head, blinking to add moisture to eyes that had remained dry too long. She extended a hand that seemed permanently bent for typing and stroked the fur behind his ears lightly. He placed a paw on her leg and looked up at her with an expression of concern, though objectively speaking, he was mentally incapable of such an emotion. She had had a dog, once, when she was a child; he escaped out the open backdoor one hot summer evening and never came back. She had never looked for him, either. Bear was different, though. As much as Harold and John took care of him too, he had really been Sameen's.

Root sighed absently, and her gaze drifted back to Harold's paper-crowded desk. She had simply disregarded the mess upon arriving and placed her computer atop the piles. Now it sat unevenly, balanced lopsidedly between a stack of bank records from an old number and the fruits of Harold's latest attempt to teach the baby bores the "Ethics of High-Frequency Decision-Making."

There was one more thing on the cluttered desk, the focal point she had chosen for her fool's errand. A tarnished medal. Sameen's medal.

It had Russian writing, which ruled out any Marine honor she might have received. Root knew from Shaw's service record, illegally accessed and downloaded long ago, that she had received American medals too, but those were not the ones Shaw kept under her pillow while she slept.

A fairly quick search had revealed that the medal was the Order of Lenin, but beyond that, there was no tracing it. It had no discerning marks from any other medal of its kind, no reason to be considered anything special among its siblings, save for its last owner and the importance she had attached to it.

She was still staring at the bit of metal adorning the desk when she heard footsteps behind her. She did not bother to look; John's measured tread was easily distinguishable from Harold's limping shuffle.

"We got a number?" The rasp of John's voice had grown more familiar in the last weeks than she had ever expected. Months ago, she would have expressed a desire that, other things equal, John might be the sacrificial lamb in the war on Samaritan. She had really had no special crusade against him; it was simply that he was the least intriguing and amusing of the ragtag team. Now, she tried to avoid all lines of thinking that involved the sacrifice of others or her own preferences regarding death.

"No," Root answered shortly. "Nothing new." She could feel John standing behind her left shoulder. He bent to pet Bear, but she felt his eyes tracking over her shoulder onto the desk. They both stared at the medal, once again sharing a focus.

"What's that?"

Root waited. She was not certain that she wanted to share more of her quest with John. It was useless, in any case, a completely futile pursuit borne of weakness. It could not bring her peace even if she did see it to the end.

The decision was partially made for her when John reached around her to pluck the medal from the desk. He held it up to the light and squinted. Root craned her head back a little to watch him.

"Order of Lenin?"

"Yes," Root affirmed.

"Where'd you get it?"

There it was. Root acquiesced with a small, hopeless sigh. "Sameen's apartment," she admitted in a murmur.

John handed the medal back, and she took it without looking at him. She studied the bronze face carefully, as though it were not singed into the foremost part of her mind. Finally, when John did not move, she asked her question.

"Do you know where she got it?"

The answer came in the low growl that Root had once mocked mercilessly, but that she had grown to trust during recent events.

"We met a lot of Russians doing this job, and she probably knew a lot before too." He seemed to be considering his words carefully, but Root had caught the low electric buzz of someone who knew something. She nearly leapt up, demanded answers, anything that could sweep her up and away from this feeling in her chest, the crushing one that had begun when she had fallen backwards into the elevator car and not left her since. Instead, she spun the chair around slowly and looked at John.

"But she kept this. Like it was special." Root omitted where exactly she had found the medal. Shaw would not have been happy with Root sharing her personal affairs. Admittedly, she also would have threatened Root with death for daring to enter her apartment and take her things in the first place.

John hesitated. "There was one number. Russian kid. Kid wanted to be a spy, and HR caught her recording a drug deal. Shaw was with her the whole time they were after her." The shadow of something that was nearly a smile ghosted across his lips, and he looked into space as if studying a pleasant memory. "She said she hated the kid. But then," he continued, looking down at Root, "she always said she hated you too."

Now it was Root's turn to look away. She stared down for a minute before reaching out to open a new search window in her browser. Clearing her throat, she demanded softly, "What was her name?"

* * *

><p>Well, that's chapter two! I didn't feel as confident about this one, so please leave comments with thoughtssuggestions. There will be at least one more chapter after this, and like I said, this will become part of "The Long Game" when I get that far. Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

_Harold finds Root in the subway. _

* * *

><p>"Ms. Groves?"<p>

Harold's timorous voice echoed weakly through the subway. Root sat slumped in Harold's desk chair, her computer long since fallen into dark-screened sleep. The medal refused to move or change no matter how long she stared at it. She had not even twitched since John left, minutes or maybe hours before. Maybe it had been days. There were no windows there, no way to pare hours into minutes into seconds save for the time-ignorant thoughts she could not shake.

"Root?"

His voice was closer then. Root shifted her head in response to his increasingly worried tone. However, she did not meet his eyes, even when he gently settled a fragrant brown paper bag on the desk in front of her.

"Not worried about me eating near your computers, Harold?" Although her question was as tongue-in-cheek as it usually was, her flat tone pulled the punch of delivery.

"I'm more concerned that you're not eating at all."

Root shrugged minutely, casting her gaze onto the grease spots staining the bag.

"I'm not hungry."

"Yet you have to eat."

This brought a spark to Root's eyes, one that finally kicked her gaze to Harold.

"I don't have to do anything."

Harold raised his eyebrows before scooting a chair closer to the desk and perching on its edge. He popped the edges of the paper bag from the staples securing the top and removed the sandwich and fries from within. He smoothed the bag flat beneath the food as he ventured a soft question.

"Has the Machine spoken to you?"

Root studiously ignored the meal in favor of staring vacantly at the bronze medal.

"Yes."

Harold leaned to the side in an attempt to enter her line of sight. His words were quiet, nearly a whisper, but they cast a chill on Root that went beyond the physical.

"You're not alone, Ms. Groves."

She pushed past the feeling and folded her arms over her chest.

"It's Root. My name is Root," she replied stubbornly, still refusing to let any feeling creep into her voice. Statement of the facts was best.

"Root."

Her chosen name did nothing to draw her attention.

"You're not alone."

Root elected to ignore comfort and head straight for the throat of the conversation.

"Do you know how She decided what we should do in that basement?"

Her eyes switched suddenly to Harold's face. He looked surprised at both her words and her sudden attention.

"Of course you do. You designed Her." She allowed a hint of mockery to seep into her voice, a bitterness that had flooded everything she had done and said since Shaw's sacrifice.

"She told me. Every single variation, she told me." Her eyes never left Harold's face, but now it was he who could not look her in the eye. Until finally he could, several long moments later, and his tears caused a hint of her characteristic smirk to quirk her lips.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

Root shrugged, as if she did not care at all. As if nothing could hurt her anymore.

"I wanted to hear it. She tried to stop. I wouldn't let Her." She did not mention how many times she had made Her replay the scenarios, over and over again, a hellish music box of could-have-beens that successively lashed bloody stripes across her and wrapped them back up again each horrific time it rewound itself.

"I can't imagine." It was a murmur where Root wanted a shout. A beloved tree had heroically fallen in the forest; she was determined to make sure the crash echoed through the world until they all went deaf and mad with her.

"You just don't want to," she rejoined viciously, her eyes icing cold contact points on Harold's face.

He shook his head and looked down, whether from shame or sadness, she could not tell.

"What will you do next?" he asked quietly after a moment.

Now Root could not remove her gaze from Harold, could not blink, could not unfreeze her face from its horrible, half-smirking mask. She waited until Harold could bring himself to look at her to answer.

"I want to kill everyone."

His face fell more, if that were possible. He was in pain. Good.

"You can't."

She _tsked_. Narrowed her eyes.

"I know that. But I want to."

Her eyes released Harold's once her point had been made. As soon as that connection was lost, the medal drew her reluctant contemplation like a black hole.

Harold glanced over as well, a little too quick to seize on the medal for it to be a real surprise.

"What's that?" Still soft, as if approaching a dangerous animal.

"Shaw's." Her voice, sharpened on her previous words, was now cutting with deadly force.

"John told you I had it. Don't lie. I always know when you lie." Her body posture was straighter now, her lounging position relaxed rather than boneless. She was becoming Root again, but not the version that Harold had come to trust.

"Are you going to talk me out of going?" she asked sardonically, sweetly. Harold had heard that voice before; he had memorized it in terror during his kidnapping.

"No. I merely recommend that you exercise caution," he volunteered.

"Worried I'll kill her, Harry?" She made her best pout, drawing the desired glimmer of ire from Harold.

"I'm concerned that you'll draw attention to both her and yourself," he said a little more sharply. "Ms. Shaw would not have wanted either of those things."

Root grabbed a fry and twirled it in between her fingers. She poked it in Harold's direction, then popped it into her mouth before she spoke.

"Why do you do that, Harry?" she asked reproachfully.

His expression was bewildered.

"Do what?"

Root continued popping fries into her mouth between sentences. She did not register the taste, but her words coupled with a simulation of normality were a sure equation for Harold's discomfort.

"Use our last names," she specified. "You don't have to answer, I know why you do it. I just wanted to know if _you_ knew," she pondered sweetly.

"Knew what?" He always pronounced the 'h' in 'what' when he was upset.

Root shrugged and pulled an uncaring face.

"That you use our last names so it can't hurt you when we die."

Harold's expression was full of hurt and shock, as if the metaphorical punch to the stomach were actually a bullet to the chest.

"But he's always Nathan to you, isn't he?" Root mused, staring up at the ceiling as she swiveled her chair back and forth. "Nathan and Grace. But always Mr. Reese, Ms. Groves. Ms. Shaw." She let the chair drift to a halt. "We're pieces to you."

"That's not true." He managed to speak, but his voice was strained.

"Isn't it?" The question was asked as if rhetorical, but was mostly meant to inflame and anger to the point that Harold might leave.

"No." The word was forceful. It was working.

"Whatever you need to tell yourself so you can sleep at night, Harry. As much as you always thought I was a monster, at least I haven't made my entire life a lie."

Once again, Root could not look away. She had seen so many men crumble to dust at her words. This was the first time she felt the crumbling within herself too, a wearing-away of the newly-built scaffolding protecting her half-constructed empathy. The dust trickled up her windpipe against nature's laws of gravity and mixed with bile to choke her.

"You're well aware that that is unfair." Harold was curious, probing; he had found her out.

"Stop," she croaked. She cleared her throat harshly. Everything was too damned hard.

"Stop what?" He leaned in closer, placed a hand on the arm of her chair.

She rolled back violently. She glared at Harold from lowered eyes and rasped her answer.

"Stop comforting me. Stop caring," she ordered. Then a touch of whine entered her words, and Harold's face became more pained than it had before. "Be angry, Harold. Say what you've been dying to say. I'm a liar! I've made my life a lie, and it's my fault it ended this way!" Her voice had risen over the sprinting sentences, until she was nearly shouting. "Say it!"

The echoes in the subway died away, replaced by Harold's soft words. Despite their low volume, they still had a bit of spine to them.

"It has not ended, and it is _not_ your fault."

Root was clenching her eyes against the tearful reprieve to her body's drought. It was self-enforced, heralded in by the screaming beep of an industrial elevator reaching its destination.

"Goddamn you."

Harold laid his hand on Root's.

"I suspect God already has." The introspective words brought Root's tearful gaze to Harold.

"No, She hasn't," she insisted. "We did it ourselves. And Shaw paid for our sins." She was shrill and tinny in her own ears, a hateful voice that seemed fitting to what she thought of herself.

"Ms. Shaw made her choices." Though he meant to reassure, Root threw off Harold's hand and raised her head defiantly.

"Her name is Sameen." He looked at her with a pity she could not bear. "Say her name." Anger was better than nothing; it was Shaw's motto, but Root was certain the other woman would not have minded if Root put it on and wore it for a while.

"Sameen made her choices." Harold refused to respond to her anger, no matter what she said. Root felt her eyes turn helpless, so she looked away. "She would not appreciate your attempts to blame yourself."

Root chuckled mirthlessly.

"She'd shoot me." Then, a quiet confession: "I wish she had."

Harold said nothing, and Root braced herself with both hands against the desk. The tears made their unwanted return to her eyes, leaking out and putting salt in her mouth. She imagined them washing away the last traces of Shaw's lips on hers, and the steady drip became a stream.

"I thought it would be me. _I wish it had been me_."

She did not dare to look at Harold; every simulation in the world could predict the pain and vulnerability in his expression. She settled for sitting there; two people, not quite together and not quite alone, crying in the shadows.

"I know."

Root's hand sought out Harold's and gripped it tightly. They did not speak again.

* * *

><p>I was going to go straight to Root finding Gen, but I felt I needed something to transition her to that point. I realized belatedly that she's working through the stages of grief. This chapter details her depression, for which I apologize. I'll try to have the last chapter up in the next few days. Thanks for reading! Comments always appreciated :)<p>

[This chapter was written to/partially inspired by "Strings" by MS MR]


	4. Chapter 4

There was hesitation in the body language of the woman leaning on her car. She was near the back of the parking lot, in sight of the playing fields, but away from all cameras. Gen had mapped out all the camera angles her first week at the school, planning her escape routes should she need them; the woman stuck to all the blind spots Gen had memorized.

That had been enough to draw Gen's knowing, calculating stare the first time she saw the tall woman. The second time she showed up, Gen took a more active interest. She holed up in the highest turret of the school's playground equipment, absent-mindedly pushing kindergartners' sticky, wondering fingers from her mirror as she directed it toward the woman. The brunette stood, dressed in funeral black and motionless, in front of her car, a different car this time than before. Then the woman seemed to look directly at the mirror. Even though it was unlikely she could really know what Gen was doing, Gen gasped. She tucked the mirror away in her plaid skirt's pocket, so inadequate for all her equipment, and swung herself down the gaily-colored metal bars. She used all of her eleven-year-old cunning, learned both on the street and on the playground, to camouflage herself in the other children that swirled like schools of fish through the grassy grounds.

The third time Gen saw her, she was no longer in front of her car. She was not even in the parking lot. No, the next time Gen spotted the woman she had come to think of as her next target, it was when her bright, suspicious eyes met sad, depthless ones, and her house-mother said sweetly, as if she did not even know the meaning of the word 'pain,' "Gen, your Aunt Sam's here to see you! Isn't that lovely?"

Gen glared defiantly at the tall woman, standing so out-of-place in the colorful, messy common room. Through the outer layer that pretended to be a caring relative, past the inner lay of pain and grief, Gen glimpsed a hard core that stared out at her in a silent challenge. There was something familiar about it.

Without a word to either adult, Gen swung her legs down from the sofa and strode out the door. As she turned to the right, she paused and heard her house-mother say saccharinely, "She must be so happy that you're here. She's never had any visitors before." There was a question there, too, a _where have you been?_ that Gen vaguely appreciated, even if she did not need to be protected, but the stranger ignored that.

"Well, I'm very happy to have found her here."

* * *

><p>Root initially had difficulties stretching the edges of her mental picture of Shaw to wrap around the idea of a child in her life. Or not in her life, not quite, but obliquely related to her life, a blurry figure in motion caught in the background of a snapshot by accident.<p>

Her face knitted in confusion, in disbelief, when John told her. She filed away the name for later research, more interested in that moment in clarifying the picture in her head.

"This belonged to a child." Though she made statements, he answered as if they were questions. It saved both of them some face in the underlying battle between them, the one with loud clashes that had quietened to mere whispers when Shaw disappeared, but which would never quite die out.

"Yes." John continued to study the medal, much as Root had done. She would never tell him that their instincts in this instance were identical.

"And she gave it to Shaw." Her voice took on another layer of disbelief. John looked at her with a hint of annoyance. He had never been one to romanticize Shaw, but any insinuation, intended or not, that Shaw had not deserved every tiny gesture of gratitude she had ever gotten put his hackles up.

"Yes." He put warning in his voice, and Root raised her head to meet it as it came.

"And Shaw kept it." The challenge was returned in a voice that dared him to question her good opinion of Shaw.

"I guess so." His shrug seemed to say that he could not care less, but as Root had once written in her files on the team, his fault was that he cared too much. That was as true now as it had ever been.

* * *

><p>Root hung back as she followed Gen down the hall. She was struggling to keep everything under the surface, to act as confidently as the smooth hacker of both people and machines she had been for over twenty years. She paused in mid-stride when she realized she could no longer see Gen. She looked around in mild confusion, then heard a sarcastic voice from her left.<p>

"In here, _Aunt Sam_."

Root turned toward the open doorway from which she had been so mockingly hailed. She followed the arrow of hallway light into the dark room, a classroom by the look of it, and turned on the lights. Gen sat perched on the large desk at the front of the room, and for a moment it all looked a little too much like the last time she had entered a classroom with a child. She shut the door carefully, both on the room and those thoughts, and turned back to the reason for her visit. Before she spoke, though, she walked swiftly to the computer in the corner and yanked the power cord from the wall with a jerk. Then, with a smirk, she nodded gracefully and accepted her seat atop a too-small front-row desk.

Gen had carefully schooled her face into an expression of disinterest, but Root could see the muscles twitching in her jaw, the questions ready to overwhelm her.

"You're not my aunt." It was not a question, but an opening gambit.

Root tipped her head in admiring acknowledgment of the sally.

"No, I'm not."

Gen cocked her head to the side in silent response to Root's motions, kicking her legs against the desk. Between thumps, she continued.

"You work with Harold."

Root raised her eyebrows to display mild surprise, even if that was not quite adequate for what she really thought. The child was more perceptive than she had expected.

* * *

><p>Of course, it had been difficult to draw a complete picture from the distance of the parking lot. The idea she had of Gen was more of an incomplete sketch, with words and observations and data gleaned from impersonal computer records providing the suggestive grey lines for what the girl might be like. Perhaps the best indictors she had been able to find were Harold's notes from when Gen's number had come up, and John's offhanded comments.<p>

"I guess she had to be a pretty weird kid, for Shaw to like her that much," he had said while eying her pointedly. Root had let the implied comment on her own _weirdness_ pass so that he would keep talking, although her narrowed eyes let him know that his meaning had not gone entirely unheard. "I'm just saying, Shaw was impressed, okay?" he added. "At the beginning, when you weren't—" he had paused, then given her an amused look "_around_, she wasn't—" He had paused again, this time not to tease, but to think.

"She didn't care before that. About the numbers," he had said slowly. "But then… she didn't stop until this kid was safe. And then she never stopped again." His eyes had dropped away from hers not long into his short monologue, and so both of them had sat staring at the ground for a long time, trying to reconcile a soldier who could not care with a warrior who would have, and perhaps had, died to protect others.

So when Root had first gone to the school, she had not quite known what to expect. There was the possibility that the kid would be a mini-Shaw, or that she would be completely normal. Root could not discern whether she would prefer the pain of the first or the disappointment of the latter.

And then the girl had seen her, and furthermore, had proceeded to _spy_ on her. Expertly. Harold's notes had not been exaggerating. The way she had faded into the background of the playground tableau, utilized the crowds and similar clothing to distract long enough to slip away, was nothing short of beautiful.

It was almost like the particularly-admired skillset of another small force of nature Root knew. Almost like watching what Shaw might have been like as a child, had they known each other then.

And so when she had forged Harold Wren's signature on the forms adding her alias to school records, she held her emotions carefully in stasis. This could not be anything more or less than an information-gathering mission.

But then she saw Gen's mistrust, so like Shaw's, and she was in shock. She nearly failed to respond to the maternal figure's carefully veiled admonitions in the common room. She was too busy watching, then following a blurry little ghost down the hallway. She was going into another classroom, for another conversation that she was not sure she wanted, and it was grim work to make herself do so calmly.

* * *

><p>Root surfaced from her thoughts, replaying in her head like old home videos, to smile at the skeptical girl.<p>

"Yes, I work with Harold." She waited patiently for the next words.

"So you know Shaw." Unexpected words.

Root's breath caught in her throat. Of course the girl would ask after Shaw, of course she would, but Root had not been prepared for that. Had somehow forgotten, in the struggle of this whole pointless chase to understand a single element of Shaw's storied life, that she would have to explain why Root, a stranger, had come in place of a small, angry, and somehow beloved spy.

"Yes, I- I did." With that cowardly whisper, Root destroyed the bravado in Gen's eyes in a way that condemned her to yet another layer of self-hate over the thick sediment she had accumulated over the years.

Gen stilled, then slipped from the desk, casting energy off herself in ropes of surprise and panic, ropes that wrapped around Root's head, immobilized it, forced her to watch destruction once again.

"You—you _did_. So she's—" Once again, Root could not look away. Once again, there was nothing she could do.

She shook her head helplessly even as her traitorous lips whispered, "She's missing. We don't know."

Gen shook her head too, but violently, as if to shake Root's words from her ears like water droplets. She stood with hands clenching and unclenching quickly, exuding dreadful electricity that brought chills to Root's skin like static.

"How can you not know?" she demanded vehemently.

Root could only stare at her helplessly. It was the question she had tried desperately to avoid for weeks, even though it seeped through her skin while she slept and poisoned her, weakened her. It was the question she had thought, but never voiced to the Machine, too afraid of what her God might reveal of Her own weakness, and Root's. It was the question to which she could not reach an answer, and she hated herself for it.

All of that, however, would not placate the angry hurricane currently staring daggers at her shamed silence.

Gen hit her like a sledgehammer, and she welcomed the too-tight arms wrapped around her wounded midriff and the pain they brought with relish. The scene began to blur with her tears, although she was not certain if the muffled sobs she heard were her own or Gen's.

* * *

><p>This chapter was approaching 2,000 words with a lot more to go, so I decided to split it in two. Therefore, the fifth and most likely final chapter will follow in a few days. I hope that you enjoyed this, and please, if you have any comments or suggestions please leave reviews, as I love hearing from all of you lovely people :)<p> 


	5. Chapter 5

"_How can you not know?" she demanded vehemently._

_Root could only stare at her helplessly. It was the question she had tried desperately to avoid for weeks, even though it seeped through her skin while she slept and poisoned her, weakened her. It was the question she had thought, but never voiced to the Machine, too afraid of what her God might reveal of Her own weakness, and Root's. It was the question to which she could not reach an answer, and she hated herself for it. _

_All of that, however, would not placate the angry hurricane currently staring daggers at her shamed silence._

* * *

><p>Root closed her eyes in a wild attempt to shut out the events of the last month before they flooded out her eyes and drowned the little storm looming in front of her, but something leaked out before her eyes shut fully.<p>

"What happened?" she heard Gen demand fearfully.

Root opened her eyes to the ceiling, looking for the divine inspiration that had disappeared in the face of the raging war. She breathed deeply, but the breath met a dam in her throat and flowed out again without fully reaching her lungs.

"She was shot. We saw her get shot," she confessed stiltedly. "They took her."

"But she's not _dead_," Gen said with certainty. Then a thin trickle of doubt came out with her next words, and Root wanted to laugh wildly, because she had heard the same drop of a question in her own voice of late. "She's not dead, is she?"

Root swiped a finger under each eye and refocused on Gen's deadly calm face. The words choked her again with all the force of one of Shaw's punches. All she could manage was "oh, sweetie—" before every single word ebbed away.

Gen hit her like a sledgehammer, and Root welcomed the too-tight arms wrapped around her not-quite-healed midriff and the pain they brought with relish. The scene began to blur with her tears, although she was not certain if the muffled sobs she heard were her own or Gen's.

After a few moments, Root felt the force held in her arms surge outward with a mumbled "you're hurting me." She released the tight grip she had not realized she had on Gen, and the girl rubbed viciously at wet eyes.

"What do we do now?" Gen queried thickly.

Root nearly laughed again with the same frantic humor that had dogged her and her tears for weeks.

It was the question at the foremost of her mind. It was dug in with sharp metal claws that ripped everything else apart in the wake of Shaw's disappearance: what was she supposed to do now? She had followed the clues, found everything there was to find, and yet somehow she had not found Shaw. That question was a cement wall extending for miles in both directions, with no top visible through the clouds obscuring the sky, and no footholds if she did have the strength to climb. Despite everything that she had done to leave Samantha Groves behind in favor of Root, Root who could fight, Root who had _power_, she might as well be Gen's age again. Once again, she was left helplessly beating her hands against the immovable unfairness that plagued her and those she loved.

"I wish I knew," Root admitted in a whisper.

Suddenly Gen's furious energy returned.

"Don't you have a way to track her? Or if she was shot, she had to go to a doctor or a hospital. And she'll probably escape anyway," Gen argued passionately.

"We tried all that," Root insisted quietly. "There's no way to track her, no doctor or hospital that we could find. If she escaped, we don't know." The litany was the same one that she repeated to herself at loose moments, though she usually tacked on a hundred other gambits that she had tried and lost.

"Doesn't _anyone_ know _anything_?" Gen demanded with a shout and a kick at the desk behind her.

Root bristled minutely at this.

"We have good information, but the other side is just as good at hiding it." And when she spoke, it was with certainty, although she was not sure of anything anymore.

"Where do you get your intel, anyway," Gen muttered stormily.

"From a friend," Root replied, not without her own anger.

"Some friend," Gen spat, then whispered something viciously in Russian.

Gen's reaction met a kindred feeling in Root's chest, and she tucked it away to be examined later. Meanwhile, she pulled her initial reason for finding Gen from her pocket.

"I found this, in her things," she started uncertainly. She stopped when Gen gasped and grabbed the medal from her hands.

"She kept it!" Gen exclaimed. Then, quietly, "I knew she wouldn't sell it. But I thought she might lose it." Her shoulders curved in around the object she held cupped tight in to her chest, as if protecting a newly-caught lightning bug. Then her face turned up to meet Root's. "Where was it?"

Root glanced to the side, uncharacteristically embarrassed.

"Under her pillow," she muttered with a sideways twitch of a smirk.

Gen crowed aloud at this, and the smallest of smiles broke onto Root's face for a moment before ebbing away again.

"She'll kill you for finding it there," Gen commented decidedly, turning her attention to Root's imagined bloody future with a relish that Root recognized as akin to that of another diminutive friend.

"I know," Root sighed. "I'm counting on it." And then, because she desperately wanted to know, "Why did you give the medal to Shaw?"

Root did not expect either the answer or its speed in coming. "As a reminder," Gen answered readily, as if it were the obvious response.

Root shook her head in slight confusion.

"A reminder of what?"

"Of what I told her." With a put-upon sigh at Root's general lack of knowledge, Gen kept on. "That she does feel things, but the volume's turned down, so she has to listen really hard or she'll miss it." Again, she spoke as if her words were common knowledge, but they were new and wonderful to Root.

Root turned her eyes down before Gen could see her heart crest and break with every beat in response to that explanation. Shaw had kept the medal close to her; she had wanted to be reminded, every day, that she could feel. The beating against her ribcage in both joy and sadness was too much, and all she could manage to say was a broken "thank you."

And then, because it had to be confessed: "it happened because she was saving me and our friends." She held her breath and waited for either a reassurance or a judgment, and she hunched over, uncertain which to fear more.

Gen simply shrugged carelessly, waving this last away as unworthy of mention.

"She always saves someone," she explained carefully, as if to a child. "That's what Shaw does."

Root looked at her in shock. Harold and John had been in the stock exchange, and they should have known what to say. In spite of that, every 'it wasn't your fault' and 'you couldn't have taken her place,' every 'she wouldn't want you to do this,' did nothing to fill her need for self-punishment. Their words could not sweep away the fact that she stood there and watched Shaw fall. And now, this child had dispelled with a few charged words the notion that there was any blame to be given in the first place.

Ignoring Root's rapid emotional changes, Gen turned her attention to apparently more important matters. "She's not just your friend, is she?" she inquired suspiciously.

Root gave a watery chuckle and considered lying for a brief moment, something that she suspected Gen recognized from her pause, but her gratitude combined with Gen's use of the present tense in reference to Shaw gained her the truth.

"Not exactly. What makes you think that?" she turned the question onto Gen in a bid for more time to gather herself.

"You were in her bed, looking under her pillow," Gen stated matter-of-factly. "I know what goes on."

Root examined the proof of the matter and concluded that Gen almost certainly did know what went on in many situations. She shrugged. And then, because she needed to tell someone who still believed in the possibility of Shaw's survival, she went a little further.

"I miss her," she whispered. "And I need to know, one way or the other. I need that." The tears started to leak out again, but were momentarily pushed back when a small hand crept into view and insinuated itself softly on top of her own.

"She's still alive. I don't think she can die," Gen confided with an air of one imparting state secrets.

Root laughed, the first genuine laugh since Shaw, because although she had put on a brave face during the search, and played a dozen everyday people since, she had not found anything at which to truly laugh. Now, though, sitting in a dim classroom being comforted by a child, and Shaw's strange spy-protégé at that, was too bizarre, and so she laughed. It was short, and rang hollow at the end, but it was a laugh nonetheless, and she felt lighter for it.

"I hope not," she ventured finally.

Gen looked at her as though Root was the most pathetic being she had every held in the force field of her gaze.

"I should get back to the common room," she said pityingly. With the matter of Shaw's probably immortality agreed upon, the child seemed once again unconcerned with anything more pressing than expressing her disdain for the whole world. "_Aunt Sam_," she scoffed suddenly. "Is your name even Sam?"

Root laughed again, and this one was easier.

"Not anymore," she confessed lightly. "You can call me Root."

"That's a weird name," Gen remarked as she swung out of the room.

Root shrugged and rose to follow.

"Says the girl named Gen," she derided as she followed the small figure down the hallway. From an extra sense borne of long habit, she could imagine Gen's exaggerated eye roll, and muscle memory made her grin.

She had missed that.

* * *

><p>Exiting the building to find her car in the dark parking lot, Root walked with steps that had regained their old decisive purpose.<p>

"Keep it," Gen had said of the medal, pressing it into Root's long hands. She had clamped onto Root's waist for a brief, forceful moment before swimming back into the flow of the busy common room.

Now as Root walked, the medal bounced on her chest in time with her steps, reminding her now of two people and one singular hope. One accompanying thought replayed over and over in her mind, tracking over the questions she had dwelt upon for months and overwriting them in big black capital letters: _Shaw is alive. And someday, somehow, I'm going to find her._

* * *

><p>Well, that's the last chapter! Thank you all for bearing with me through this! This is longer than the stuff I usually write, so I hope it turned out okay. If you enjoyed this, it will eventually be included as part of "The Long Game," so start looking atfollowing that for more Root-centric writing. I hope to start updating that semi-regularly in the next few days. Again, thank you, and I would love to hear any suggestions you have in the reviews!


End file.
